Tag: Programs

Magnus and Will hang out by the pool chatting about their social lives.

This episode starts off a bit too familiar with a flying vehicle going down. The previews tricked us. We were promised action and suspense, but there was more focus on Magnus and Will arguing about whether or not Will should spend his time trolling for women at a geek conference. There is a throwaway line about him being lonely after Invisible Girl died, but she just died a few episodes ago. So the supposedly sensitive guy plans to mourn the loss of his love by chasing smart tail in another country a short time after they put her in the ground.

I guess it is one of those episodes that caters to the Magnus/Will shippers, but I do not happen to be part of that camp. Even though Dunne only seems to have decent chemistry with Tapping, it is just not pretty to think about.

One of the problems I had with the episode was that you keep forgetting about the abnormal they captured and are trapped with. Another was that the viewer probably does not care why Magnus did not want Will galavanting across the world chasing women. She could have told him she thought it was tacky and it would have had the same resonance. After she admitted why, I wanted more of that part of the conversation, and was very disappointed with the result.

This story was one of the small set/low budget ones and the abnormal looks like it could have been made in Paint. The previous episodes which used this approach were written much better, even Magnus’ reveal of her intentions was dragged out long enough for interest to fade. The bad science involved in their methods of escape was worse than the bad logic in Magnus’ plan at the end of the previous episode.

Also, it is really beginning to bother me that Will is a psychiatrist and worked in the Sanctuary with Magnus and the others for some time, and still could not figure out why Magnus did not want him to take his field trip. In the beginning, the deal was that he was smart and figured things out that other people could not, but he does not seem to pick up on details that the viewers figure out 15 minutes into the show. They took his glasses out and spiked his hair a bit to distance him from the “Daniel Jackson revisited” jokes and have been writing him considerably dimmer just to funnel weak plot. This bothered me in the episode Fragments when he could not interpret the abnormals gestures until much later than should have been acceptable.

It seems that the conversation in the story could have been had by Will and Magnus over coffee that morning, adding a cheap squid to the mix did not do the show any favors. This episode was definitely filler, and it showed.